My first post is inspired by Estonian-Air’s last competition, where they draw two return tickets to a person, who best describes a romantic 3 day holiday in one of Estonian Air’s new destinations. And I guess just because I love to write about traveling in general 🙂

I wrote about an overly romantic 3-day holiday in Venice. There are some presumptions: one – money is not a problem, it just happens to be a lot of it 🙂 and second the weather is delightful.

So my dream romantic trip went something like this:

From the airport, we would make our way straight to the hotel with a water taxi. Best and most appropriate way to start a trip to Venice that would perfectly set the scene for the rest of the travel. We would stay in ‘Starhotel Splendid Venice’ (money is not a problem, remember :)), which is a small romantic boutique hotel in the heart of Venice. We won’t stay there for long though because warm spring sun is shining and it is impossible to resist.

We will leave the map at home and go wondering around the wobbly little streets and canals and hopefully will make our way to Piazza San Marco at some point. We will try to find a place in one of the overcrowded restaurant in the piazza to sit down in the warm sun to enjoy our first class of cold prosecco and some chichettis and take pleasure of the street artists, musicians and all the buzz around us. After a while of relaxing we shall head to the Basilica and light a candle with our secret dreams and wishes and of course feed the pigeons 🙂

After some more wondering around the wobbly streets and peeking in to the cutest artist shops we will meet Luisella, who is the most recommended tour guide in Venice. We will spend a lovely afternoon with Luisella, who will take us to the undiscovered places of Venice and show how the city looks like through the locals eyes. Being much knowledgable about everything that has to do with Venice after the tour we will head back to the Piazza San Marco for the sunset. We rest our legs on the sidewalk and watch the people getting more and more lively and listen to the street musicians play. We will have dinner in a local restaurant that Luisella recommended and enjoy the most fantastic local cuisine with jazz music and try to blend in with the locals. After the dinner we will head back to the hotel to get a good sleep.

The second will start early at the dawn. Venice is at its most magical – still sleepy and almost empty, covered with morning fog. We are heading to the Rialto market, where fisherman are already enjoying their first class of vine. It will be the freshest and tastiest breakfast. From there we head to Campo Santa Margherita. It is always something interesting happening there. Be it a protest, flea market or student debate.

Next stop is Punta della Dogana, where we will take in all the modern art and around noon we will head to Osteria al Bacareto having just a light lunch and tasting some local vines instead. We will spend the evening at Villa Ines, a gorgeous villa with a superb view on the surrounding gardens and villas, where we will learn more about local cuisine with Marika and prepare a dinner for ourselves according to her tips and advice. On our way home we will just have one last glass of wine in this wonderful little busy wine bar that is impossible just to pass by.

There are no big plans for the last day. In the morning we sleep in and I will run to a nearby pastry shop/cafe and buy us some sweet fresh pastry that we will enjoy in our hotel balcony. When the sun is already high in the sky we will head to town, stopping in all the lovely little shops-cafes and bars on our way and forgetting for a minute that we were  actually leaving very soon. We will visit again the places we loved the most and buy something sweet for memories and some little gifts for our friend and family. For the sunset we will head for the mandatory gondola ride under the Ponte die Sospiri bridge and then back to the hotel to take our stuff. 3 days passed quicker than we would have liked and we are already back at home.

This is the holiday… Did not win the free tickets, but they liked my holiday enough to offer 25% discount if I wanted to go anyway… It was still reeaalllyyy expensive though, so no Venice, not just yet.

Hopefully you got some good ideas if you were going to Venice yourself…

(Unfortunately I do not have any photos of Venice. When I went there, log time ago, we did not have digital cameras, so its upon everybody’s own imagination)